Monday, March 01, 2010

de botton quote

i'm currently reading 'the architecture of happiness' by alain de botton. the very title, and the idea that drew me to the book, is evocative of the safe little world hobby horse that i try to gallop out at every opportunity.

i suspected that the book would yield a few quotes that orbited within the amorphous universe of the safe little world concept.

lo and behold, while i waited for the fish to cook, i found one...

"We depend on our surroundings to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us the material forms which communicate to us what we need ... within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

"In turn, those places whose outlook matches and legitimises our own, we tend to honour with the term 'home'. Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.

"Our love of home is in turn an acknowledgement of the degree to which our identity is not self-determined. We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us."